Coding agents need sophisticated context

Short summary

Coding agents need sophisticated context governance that goes far beyond simply using larger context windows. Context must be continually rebuilt across stateless model calls, carefully balancing what stays visible, what's compressed, what's fetched on-demand, and what's discarded. Without proper governance, agents accumulate stale information, forget critical constraints, and get buried in tool output.

• •Context governance is a systems-design problem for agents, not a prompt-wording problem
• •Each tool call adds environmental noise; without management, old information becomes stale while still being reasoned from
• •Key design questions: what stays visible per turn, what gets compressed, what's fetched on-demand, what's isolated between agents

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.